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Does that come up a lot? How many people are currently in hospice in the state of Illinois with a few weeks to live? There have been a lot of excess deaths in
by scottlamb 6y ago
Does that come up a lot? How many people are currently in hospice in the state of Illinois with a few weeks to live?
There have been a lot of excess deaths in 2020. It seems reasonable to guess those people died of either COVID-19 or our response to COVID-19 (eg reluctance to seek medical treatment). None of these mortality statistics are perfect, but given the fairly short window of a mild COVID-19 infection, it seems pretty reasonable as a first approximation to assume that if they had it when they died, they died from it. There might be some cases where this is wrong (died of severe trauma during a car wreck in which they were a passenger rather than a driver) or questionable (the hospice case) but how much do those really affect the overall numbers?
- nsxwolf 6y agoIllinois averages 300 deaths per day from all causes, so if 3%-5% of all Illinoisians are COVID+, that error starts to add up.
- scottlamb 6y agoMeh. The excess deaths are a lot more than 3%–5%. In a super quick search: "From Feb. 2 through July 25, Illinois had officially recorded 10,252 more deaths than typically would be expected" [1] => 59 per day. If 300 people died per day (your stat) and 5% of those were misattributed to COVID-19 because they were tested and happened to have a harmless COVID-19 infection (this is a silly upper bound), that's only 15 misattributed out of the 59, so at least 75% are correct. That's already good enough to use for setting policy IMHO. In reality, I doubt everyone who died was even tested, so I think more error lies in the other direction. [1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-dataviz-coronavirus-covid-excess-deaths-illinois-20200828-llxjzyrnxnc5hjptuudce2t7ty-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-dataviz-corona...